Hillary Clinton Calls Out Trump Supporters For What They Are

Hillary Clinton Calls Out Trump Supporters For What They Are

At a fundraiser last night in New York City, Hillary Clinton turned her attention to what has been one of the truly unique phenomenons of this election cycle: The emergence of a legitimate white supremacist party in the form of Trump supporters. It was the first likable thing she’s done in recent memory.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

The other half “feel that the government has let them down…Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.

Naturally, the anti-PC types on the so-called alt right promptly unleashed a steaming piss into their diapers, as #BasketofDeplorables began trending at the top of Twitter.

Despite the awkwardness of the phrasing – basket of deplorables sounds like what a prudish Victorian husband would call his wife’s panty drawer—Clinton’s comments are otherwise unremarkable, because they happen to be true.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this summer found “Trump supporters more likely to view blacks negatively,” on a series of questions about personality traits, like intelligence and work habits. The Huffington Post similarly found that “Trump supporters are more likely than supporters of other Republican candidates to have negative feelings towards feminists, Muslims, Latinos, Gays and Lesbians, and Transgender people. In contrast, Trump supporters have far warmer feelings towards whites than supporters of other candidates.”

Two thirds of Trump supporters, it was found earlier this spring, by Public Policy Polling, believe President Obama is a Muslim, something Trump still has not explicitly denied.

Further, as Think Progress points out, “A national poll of 2000 people taken in January by YouGov found that one-third of Trump supporters believe the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, one of the most shamefully racist programs in American history, was a good idea.”

For any more evidence of the vile nature of Trump’s supporters, may I also direct you to literally any single thing they’ve said online?

It may not be accurate to say a full half of Trump’s supporters are actual racists, or, at least, they may not have been going into it. But after a certain amount of time supporting an actual unabashed one for president, it rubs off on you.

Unsurprisingly, the most tepid of the mainstream political media are already framing this as a gaffe that is equivalent to Trump’s remarks about Mexicans an Muslims and so on. In the blinkered Both Sidesism of contemporary journalism, the mere identifying of racists as such for their actual, stated racist views, will somehow me morphed into the same thing as saying racist things. If you’re looking for an answer why Trump may actually win, you needn’t stray further from that idiotic reality.